Politics Unseen

Group f.64 Photography and the Problem of Purity
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-39975-4
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 262 mm x 184 mm, Gewicht: 884 g

In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macfarlane, Ellen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Fotografie Fotografie: Geschichte und Sammlungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Group f.64 and the Limits of Political Photography

2. “The Pure Negroid Types I Prefer”: Consuelo Kanaga’s Portraits of Black Americans

3. The Politics of Edward Weston’s “Pure Food” Photography: Fruits and Vegetables in the Depression
4. Imogen Cunningham’s Botanical Photographs: American Horticulture and the Colonial Purification of Plants
Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ellen Macfarlane is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver.